The trade off we have to grudgingly accept with the world is that you get what you pay for. According to that, it’d stand to reason that CRM software with a lower price would have a smaller feature set, right? As much as it may defy conventional wisdom, Microsoft Dynamics CRM completely bucks this trend by matching and beating its competitors point for point, and doing it all at a cheaper price. To prove that, let’s take a quick look at the headlining features of two of Dynamics CRM’s leading competitors: Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM.

Salesforce has been heavily touting their cloud support lately. Wisely so, the future of CRM (and all business computing for that matter) is in the cloud. However, nobody is leading that charge quite like Microsoft. With Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is setting new standards in support and affordability with cloud computing. Salesforce has also touted its integration to Microsoft Outlook with the appropriately named “Salesforce for Outlook.” However, and forgive me for sounding flippant, but Dynamics CRM is made by Microsoft. There’s simply no competition when it comes to Outlook integration since both programs come from the same company. The Dynamics CRM team has unequalled access to develop Outlook integration, and it shows.

Oracle has a few sterling features that it touts as well. Social CRM was a hallmark for the software back in 2008, allowing users to integrate CRM functionality with social networking websites. Microsoft, on the other hand, released their first social CRM tool in 2003, and has been constantly iterating on it since. They’ve had more time to suss out the finer points of social CRM, and that results in more robust and easy-to-use tools. Oracle also supports “CRM gadgets,” which allow users to find atomized modules that can add specific functionality to solve problems quickly. Dynamics CRM is similarly mutable, though they’re called “solutions” on the Dynamics side of things. Solutions are easily found on the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace, which makes finding the solution to any of your problems a breeze.

It’s plain to see that Dynamics CRM matches the functionality of Salesforce and Oracle, but here’s the real kicker. It does all that while trouncing them in price. Taking the absolute minimum price, Salesforce.com will run $65 per month and Oracle $75 per month. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, on the other hand, is a flat $44 per month. Bear in mind that’s the base cost of Salesforce and Oracle -- odds are any real ticket price will run higher than that when you include mobile, contact on demand, offline access, and other nice-to-haves. Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers the same or better functionality as its competition at a lower price. Rather easy to see where the smart decision lies, isn’t it?